When GNOME did its version 3 and Ubuntu came up with Unity, the popularity of Linux Mint sky-rocketed, because they stuck with GNOME 2.32. The Mint team has been working on their next version for a while now, and today, they first unveiled what they're working on. There's good news - the team is working on making GNOME 3 likeable. Their question for this release: "How do we make people like Gnome 3? And what do we provide as an alternative to those who still do not want to change?"

I'm a Linux Mint Debian Edition convert myself. It's a fair bit faster than either Ubuntu or the Ubuntu based Mint release, and Mint's tested upgrade packs take most of the pain out of using a rolling distribution. It's easily the most positive experience I've had with Linux (although it'd be even more positive if I hadn't spent 20+ hours failing to get it working properly on my Thinkpad)

Like a lot of other people I didn't think much of Gnome 3 or Unity. Even setting aside the usability issues, it just seems wrong to have a Linux DE that's less customisable than Mac OS or Windows.

I've been pretty happily using XFCE on LMDE, but I'll definitely be checking out Mint's tweaks to Gnome. Based on their other decisions I'm expecting them to be practical and well thought out.